➡ To protect your privacy from Google tracking, turn off your phone and use a computer with a cleared browser that doesn’t require a Google ID. Avoid using Chrome and opt for browsers like Brave. Be cautious of devices with AI, as they can be used to track you. If you’re required to use certain apps for work, consider having two phones, one for work and one for personal use. If you suspect your phone has been hacked, a factory reset can help. Lastly, avoid devices with embedded AI and opt for Linux or open source OS options for safety.

➡ The Brax 3 phone, a product designed for privacy, is now available for crowdfunding on indiegogo.com. Other privacy-focused products include the Brax virtual phone, Brax mail, and a reasonably priced VPN solution, all available on the Braxme platform. This platform also hosts a community of over 100,000 users discussing privacy daily. Your support and donations help keep this channel running.

I recently did a video explaining the threats to the phone and I broke it down into threats to the application processor versus the modem processor. Watch that video to get the basics figured out because that’s important to understand. What I want to teach you today is how to deal with everyday situations where you might not have the right phone but you want to minimize the attack footprint on your phone. Perhaps you’re near an area where there’s a demonstration or riot. Perhaps you’re having a very private meeting and you don’t want an audience. Perhaps you left your de-google phone at home.

Perhaps you don’t want your current location to be recorded. Or maybe you need to use Uber and it doesn’t work on your de-google phone. Maybe you think you’re being hacked and want the reassurance that the hackers cannot infiltrate you. Maybe you think you’re under surveillance and someone is tracking everything you do on the internet right now. If you understand what makes the threats work then you can fight against that threat and make yourself relax. These tips work with any phone or if it doesn’t completely work I’ll give you alternatives. The point is that if you don’t happen to have a de-google phone on hand you can still defend yourself at least for the short term.

Are you interested in learning these practical tips? Stay right there. Just to give you an example, the lack of knowledge of how phone spyware works will just screw you up big time. Someone I know contacted me for help. He was being hunted down by the government for a business failure which he was only preferably involved with. This wasn’t a different country. That government’s attitude is to put you in jail first and they’ll sort out your guilt or innocence later on, like years later. Just to clear up any confusion here that person was later captured and put in jail but then a year later the charges were dropped.

I already knew he was innocent but as you can imagine the psychological impact of being put in jail with regular criminals for a supposedly white-collar crime was life-changing to say the least. I just remember the early scenarios though when all his business associates were being arrested and my friend then chose to hide at someone else’s house but contacted me and others using his regular phone. A very stupid move in my opinion. Now not every country has the resources or knowledge to go ask Google for a location ping on the Google sensor vault. But this is exactly the kind of situation where you need to understand what moves can put you at risk.

And regardless of the development level of a country, it wouldn’t be too much of an effort to get a location probably within one quarter mile just from cell tower triangulation. And that’s easily gotten from the local carrier if they know the phone number. So the way I’m going to explain this, I’ll just lay out the threats and all the options of getting around that. I gave my friend a lot of advice by the way but most of that was ignored. There’s this feeling that technology can’t possibly be that advanced. Now lucky for him the charges against him were financial based and not for any violence so I’m sure it was low priority.

But still this gives a good example to draw from. The most obvious threat of a mobile phone is location tracking. Again I will reference terms I used in that prior video so you need to watch that if what I say here is not entirely clear. Since I will not repeat the explanation. There are two classes of location threats. The more precise one is from the application processor side and this means it is the 24-7 location tracking of both Apple and Google. The US government has done geofencing using this data which is easily acquired from the Google sensor vault.

That’s where all your location history is stored by Google and this has been used in many court cases. Apple of course has a similar database though I’m not clear on the ease of sharing that with government. Since there’s a lot of duplication with Google versus Apple it may be that Google has more complete data since it includes both iPhones and Google androids. In general if you want location tracking to stop you must stop using the phone. Google androids need to be turned off. iPhones need to be stored in a Faraday bag as turning it off will not stop it from leaking location.

In the absence of a Faraday bag for your iPhone, wrap the phone completely in foil with multiple layers or use a foil bag for chips and make sure all openings are folded. There must not be any leaks and obviously turn the iPhone off as well. Now if you’re smart you will leave the iPhone somewhere and not have it with you at all as trying to cover all the leaks with this stupid device will just expose you to dangers. If you have a de-Google phone then you don’t really need to worry about this at all although you need to make sure all apps have no location permissions.

If you have a Google Android and you need to look up information on it like a contact list or some document you just have to make sure that there is no internet. Without internet the location data cannot be sent to the Google sensor vault so you can turn off data on the SIM card and you can delete any Wi-Fi connections. Assume that while in the process of turning off your internet that the location will leak during that time so I would advise doing this first at a neutral location. Unfortunately this approach will not work on iPhones since iPhones turn into AirTags when turned off.

iPhones are the worst devices to own when you want to limit your threats. I just want to make sure you understand the application processor location threat clearly. Wi-Fi triangulation and GPS will pinpoint you to within 6 feet or on an iPhone within an inch. The next threat level is when the device can track your location to within a city or section of a city. Depending on what you’re protecting yourself against this may or may not be important. The sources of a general location within one to two square miles will come from Google’s Supple feature which is attached to the GPS module and it will also be possible via the modem processor or cell baseband modem.

Both of these features use cell tower location. Supple location is not precise but for example you can be using a VPN saying you’re in Germany. But the supple location will clearly see that you’re in Boston. And your approximate location will be somewhere within one to two square miles of the identified tower in Boston. In dense areas with lots of cell towers this could be a quarter of a mile square though that area will likely be densely populated. Now if you connect to your cell service using internet, calling or texting then the carrier will perform a cell tower triangulation.

And that will really pinpoint your location to maybe a quarter mile square in a larger zone in a rural area. So to get around this you must remove your SIM card or on some phones you need to disable your SIM or eSIM. I can’t guarantee that the eSIM can be completely turned off but physically removing a SIM card will give more reassurance. Once your SIM card is removed your phone will not be sending signals to any cell tower. It can receive messages from a cell tower but it cannot transmit any identifiers. Assuming you’re not dialing 911.

There is still the risk of the Google supple signal which finds the closest tower. This will still work without a SIM card however the tower identifier data can only be sent to supple.google.com if there’s an internet or cell connection. So assuming you turn off internet then removing the SIM card will do the trick. Everyone can be roughly tracked to a degree similar to cell tower triangulation or worse if you connect to the internet using your home DSL modem. So assuming you have this kind of internet connection then your location is at the very least known to be near a carrier switching station.

But worse if you’ve never protected your location before with a VPN which is likely the bulk of you then your location will have been sold by third party apps to location aggregators. This location list can easily be rented and this will allow someone to do a reverse IP lookup and find your exact coordinates based on previously captured location information. So believe it or not IP addresses coming from DSL modems will track an exact location which can pinpoint your exact house. The solution is to always connect to the internet with a VPN. This will protect you even if your location has been compromised in the past and using the VPN will prevent future compromise as well.

This is a different kind of threat. Let’s say you’re using your phone normally and you’re not necessarily concerned about your location being known. However you are concerned that someone is recording your every click on the internet and knows exactly what you are doing. Well actually Google knows all this information whether you believe it or not. And the way it knows this is from your Google ID which you use to log into some Google platform like YouTube or from your phone running some Google app or from your Google Android device. The best way to solve this is to do two things.

First turn your phone off. This is whether it’s an iPhone or Google Android. Next access the internet via a browser on a computer without logging in and this browser should have cleared cookies and not used to put in a Google ID since the time cookies have been cleared. What this will do is remove the Google ID from your internet actions. Also turning off the phone eliminates having the Google ID from the phone be matched to the computer using a technique called cross device tracking. I would also use a VPN on the computer and make sure as well that you disable location permissions on the browser.

As an additional precaution I would not use Chrome as the browser on the computer. My preferred choice for this kind of use would be brave. Now I’m always ready for this. My computers always have three to four browsers installed. Chrome for use with Google and thus will have a Google ID and then I have brave and it would never be used for anything with a Google ID. This procedure is what I call browser isolation. Just for clarity using a computer is much safer than using a phone. There are limited sensors on a PC. However computers with Apple intelligence like mSilicon Max and Windows Copilot computers will be just as dangerous as a phone.

So I would not use these either. In these devices the AI can be used to search for you. Use an older OS or Linux. Proximity tracking is a little different. General location tracking can find anyone if your device is known. Proximity tracking is a way to prove you are near a particular location without knowing who you are. For example during the J6 riots it would be assumed that law enforcement personnel would have placed stingray devices at specific entry and exit points to a building. Stingray devices track anyone nearby by simulating a cell tower so phones will connect to them automatically and announce their identity.

But even if you remove your SIM card which would disable the stingray attack your phone would be announcing its identifiers using the Wi-Fi MAC address and the Bluetooth MAC address. I would imagine that such devices would be installed in government buildings for example or high security buildings so the movement of individuals can easily be recorded by security systems simply by having sensors of these radio transmissions. Again the radio transmissions from your phone come from the modem processor, the Wi-Fi module and the Bluetooth module. You can disable all of this by turning your phone off.

By the way forget airplane mode. Again an iPhone would not be safe here since with the phone off the iPhone would continue with the Bluetooth transmissions. So don’t even enter such a space with an iPhone. By the way close to 60% of the US population have iPhones so many of you will fail here because of your device choice. Worst device to choose as I repeatedly say here. If you leave the phone on another way of doing a proximity check is that the location could be transmitting an ultrasound signal of some sort and then anyone who makes a call from the location will have the recorded background with the ultrasound identifier.

This would be a great way for law enforcement to track unknown people’s locations by putting ultrasound at various locations. This can then be automatically picked up when the calls entered a public switched telephone network, PSTN. This threat involves having a microphone listen in to conversations. While three letter agencies can do this to smart TVs apparently, I’ll focus on the phone side of things. The way this threat works someone can control your phone through the SS7 channel off the phone network and have your phone initiate a call. But this is without your knowledge. The instruction to call would be sent via a hidden text command.

The end result of this is that the phone microphone can now hear the sounds around you like conversations even if the phone is in your pocket and you would have no idea it did this. But the party that your phone call could then record whatever the microphone hears and then when the call terminates there would be no record of the call. If you want to be certain that no one is listening to your conversations via a phone microphone then you must turn your phone off. I’d feel better if an iPhone was in a faraday bag as well but for this specific threat the phone needs to be connected to a cell tower like in normal use for this threat to occur.

Removing or disabling a SIM card also prevents the execution of this threat. For any SS7 work your phone number must be active. In today’s world we are expected to behave like normies at all times and the phone is used to ensure that we follow the strictures of the surveillance infrastructure. One of the most common ways this is done is when some companies require you to use particular apps and these apps do not work in the Google phones. It should be obvious to you that being forced to use certain apps is for surveillance purposes. Doctors are forced to use certain apps when accessing hospital data so they can record every move the doctor makes.

Truck drivers are required to use location apps on their phone because the location of the cargo must be locatable at all times. Service repair technicians are tracked by employers to know where they are at all times so there are many situations where you are forced to abide by the requirements of surveillance. The solution folks is to have two phones. If you need to have a phone for use as a truck driver then have the dedicated phone permanently assigned to the truck. Just leave it plugged in there all the time. But if you’re doing other personal interactions use your own personal phone.

Make sure the two phones do not have the same Google ID. Best if you use a D Google phone because a phone like a Brax 3 phone for example has no identifiers or even location tracking so it automatically insulates the connection between two devices. Even if you feel like you need to use a normal phone because of work it does not preclude you from owning a second phone that you know is not being used to track you. Again only the Google phones are immune from application processor tracking however they are still subject to modem processor tracking though as I explained that is not a precise method.

When I travel I will often carry a Google Android turned off available for emergencies a phone that can use Uber for example but for me it would be only be limited for you such as that. This is just insurance because while 90% of apps work on the Google phones most of those that surveil you like Uber or company required apps will normally not work on a D Google phone. But as I said I travel with this phone charged but completely off and if this were an iPhone again I store it in a fair day bag. Finally I want to focus on something that is actually pretty rare in real life but I want to give you an assured way to give yourself peace of mind.

As I said in my recent video on phone threats it is highly unlikely that your phone has been hacked without physical access unless you’re a state agent. The most well known hack on phones is the Pegasus attack which was created by the Israeli company the NSO group. Unless you’re a threat to a state particularly dictatorship states then it is not likely you’d be targeted by Pegasus since the use of this is not free. I’m sure the NSO group has paid millions to have this used but some of you persist in thinking your neighbor has the skills to attack your phone.

For the sake of this discussion I will accept your premise. If you think your phone has been hacked then the solution is simple do a factory reset. Once you do this you can be rest assured that the hack is gone. This is true of most of your devices like computers as well. While it is possible for some high value targets to be hacked at the BIOS level I’m guessing you’re likely overthinking your importance as that would require physical access. If you’re that important then change phones or use a phone like a Brax 3 phone where an independent party reflashes the BIOS to factory settings.

Surveillance comes in additional new forms now that don’t even require hacking and that is by asking the AI what you are doing. There’s no answer to this but do not use the device with embedded AI. The current least of these devices are iPhone 16s, Windows Co-pilot PCs and M Silicon Mac PCs. I would call these dangerous devices. Linux and open source OS options are always going to be safe. Folks this channel relies on your community support. As you’ve seen I don’t take any sponsors and instead of asking for donations we have created solutions to aid in the privacy battle ourselves.

One of the newest solutions is the Brax 3 phone which is currently on the crowdfunding site indiegogo.com. This phone is a true privacy phone which we created with a team of contributors. Check it out. We also have other products like the Brax virtual phone which is a voice over IP service with no KYC, a rare feature nowadays. We also have Brax mail that allows for unlimited aliases so you can use a different email for every internet platform. We have bytes VPN which is our reasonably priced VPN solution. We also offer other D Google Fonts which will provide the benefits I’ve discussed in this video.

All these are on my platform Braxme. Please join the community of over 100,000 users there talking about privacy daily. The store is there with the products I mentioned. Again your support sustains this channel and thank you for that and your donations to Patreon, locals and YouTube memberships. Thank you for watching and see you next time. Thanks for watching. [tr:trw].

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